Decrypting Data for Clearer Cyber Security

As part of your cyber security strategies, you may have utilized SSL encryption to increase your level of protection against all forms of cyberattack. This kind of encryption provides a much greater level of privacy; however, it can also hide potential criminal activities that could expose your data to risks. Fortunately, there is one way to solve this predicament: decryption of SSL encrypted data.

Here’s a closer look at how both SSL encryption and decryption works and how these two can affect your company at large:

How SSL Encryption Works

In a basic sense, SSL encryption works by scrambling the data sent over the Internet. For hackers trying to look in, the data is meaningless garbage. Without decryption, there is no way to make any sense of what is being transmitted. This is great for sensitive information such as credit card information, health-related histories, and a lot of other applications. In an attempt to create a private way to transmit information, SSL encryption hides data from hackers and other criminals. However, it also gives a place for criminals to hide in plain sight.

Malicious Data and Your Company

With encryption, looking into data is impossible. It is just a mess of bites that require decryption before it provides any readable information. This gives malicious communications a safe hiding spot from your cyber security methodologies. As a security measure, companies are deciding where and what data should be decrypted and inspected within their own corporate networks.

Decryption of SSL Encrypted Data

For most SSL encrypted communication, the endpoint is where the security key is used to decrypt the information. With the way encryption works, decryption requires a separate point into the transmission located between the sender and the server. In an effort to increase security, a firewall is added to the transmission of data. At the firewall, the SSL certificate is used to decrypt the data sent. It is then monitored for potentially hazardous information and then encrypted again. The firewall then resends the data to the server that it was originally destined to arrive at.

Reverse Proxy Method of SSL Inspection

For a complete way to inspect SSL encrypted data, the reverse proxy method is available. In this method, all SSL communication passes through an inspection device. The SSL certificate is used at this point to decrypt all of the information. The decrypted information is then sent to the original destination on your corporate network. This provides a clear picture of all the information being received by your network, but it requires additional support and greatly reduces privacy.

The balance between privacy and cyber security is difficult to achieve. With the privacy of SSL encryption, the communication to and from your corporate network is hidden and protected. Unfortunately, you are creating a blind spot in your security by allowing SSL encrypted traffic. The answer is to decrypt and inspect some of the traffic your company sees. At Idealstor, we provide the services to decrypt SSL data within your computer systems. With decryption, criminals are no longer able to hide within SSL data transmissions. To learn more about our services, contact us today.